As a sort of proof-of-life exercise, a collection of private software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies recently posted their earnings despite it not being strictly necessary, according to Bloomberg. This is, you won’t be shocked to read, “a bid to convince lenders of their resilience to disruption from artificial intelligence,” Bloomberg says.
The SaaS world is in a rough place at the moment because Wall Street sees a near future in its crystal ball where a lot of the dreary computer programs people use at work will be replaced with vibe-coding. The narrative around this is that highly debt-burdened software companies may soon not have enough cash coming in to service their debt—bad for the companies, and bad for the companies they’ve borrowed from.
how it feels to navigate an enterprise saas codebase with claude pic.twitter.com/nOUvP02k3z
— tweet davidson (@andyreed) February 1, 2026
The wider phenomenon around this is known as the SaaSpocalypse, and it kicked off in earnest when about $300 billion worth of business software company value vanished from the universe around the start of this month. Companies hit by the high-profile sell-off throughout January and February included LegalZoom, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Salesforce, Adobe, and Figma, according to the New York Times.
So Bloomberg noticed on Tuesday that McAffee had announced earnings that are about the same as this time last year—implying, probably, that it’s not about to miss any debt payments. An “IT modernization” company called Rocket Software saw a 5.2% bump compared to last year, Bloomberg says. Perforce Software’s earnings are slightly down by just the tiniest bit—$644 million compared to $654 million last year—but a call went out to investors recently in which Perforce Software’s leaders explained that they would soon increase revenue by “embedding AI into products.”
An analytics company called Cloudera that Bloomberg described as “unusually private about its financials” is trumpeting “over 50% year-over-year growth,” in a statement on its website. “Cloudera’s momentum is fueled by its unique position as the only data and AI platform vendor supporting deployment anywhere with a unified experience,” it also claims in that statement.
As noted by the Harvard Business Review in 2022, SaaS companies are thought of as money-printing machines because they’re on the monthly subscription model, like Netflix, but boring. The sudden frenzy over agentic tools like OpenClaw seems to have conjured a vivid mental image: millions of IT workers across the world smashing the “unsubscribe” button en masse. These SaaS companies themselves are, quite reasonably, demonstrating that the nightmare many are envisioning hasn’t actually come true.
Gizmodo reached out to McAffee, Rocket Software, Perforce, and Cloudera for comment, and will update if we hear back.
Source: gizmodo.com
